Herald Boo-Boo Watch parts 28&29

The good news today is that Herald boo-boos seem to be coming less frequently, but this week we had two.

A couple of months ago a new reporter named Tom Leyde started covering Carmel news. In reading his stories I get the impression that the man has never spent much time in Carmel, and he doesn't seem to know his way around. Worse, he has written reports containing significant factual errors. I discussed two of these in detail in part 13 and part 14 of the Herald Boo-Boo Watch.

Since then I was beginning to think that maybe he was starting to get the lay of the land. His reports on the happenings at city hall were in accord with reports from other sources. However, Leyde's reports were limited to city council activities. They did not require a broader knowledge of the town layout and features, and unfortunately his ignorance of the territory became glaringly evident again this week.

In Tuesday's paper dated November 4th Leyde wrote about the council's decision to move the weekly farmer's market out of Devendorf Park onto "Sixth Street, between Mission and Junipero Streets" Here's how it appeared.


The first error in this article is the street name. Carmel's numbered streets are avenues, so it should read Sixth Avenue, not Sixth Street. If this was the first time he made this mistake I would overlook it, but he made the same mistake a few days earlier. It's a sign that he doesn't know the territory he's covering.

Then in the 5th paragraph he wrote "...with the move to Sixth Street, the market will be further from the core of Carmel's Ocean Avenue Merchants." Here he is giving readers the impression that the farmer's market is moving some distance away from Devendorf Park. But actually, the segment of Sixth avenue in question marks the northern boundary of the small park, so at best the whole shebang is moving maybe 50-75 feet, not a significant distance by any means. In fact it will still be visible from Ocean Avenue.

Further along, Leyde lists several conditions the city council imposed on the farmer's market. Leyde described one this way: "Fifteen percent of the booths at the market should be available at no cost to local groups, such as The Carmel Bach Festival and California Repertory Theater."*

Once upon a time there was a short-lived California Repertory Theater in Pacific Grove, but it went out of business almost 30 years ago. Currently, there's a California Repertory Company in Long Beach, but they're hardly local. The one in Carmel is called Pacific Repertory Theatre, or Pac-Rep for short. It's a well-known place. Everybody on The Peninsula has heard of it. Well, almost everybody.


Individually, these are pretty minor mistakes, but collectively they show that the reporter doesn't know his territory. That makes it hard to take anything he writes seriously.

* NB: The sentence cited above was printed on two separate pages. the beginning was on page 2 and continued on page 4, so I wasn't able to easily reproduce an image of it here.
______________

Now for boo-boo #29, which was on page 3 of the November 6th Herald. The paper misspelled the name of actor Benedict Cumberbatch as "Cumberpatch."


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Three Political Puzzles

Things I've learned

Oh, Nikki, you're better at math than that.